Bananas Foster Bread, Better Late Than Never

Have you guys met Maranda from Jolts & Jollies?  A month or so ago she blogged about making apple butter and in her post she mentioned having more jars of it that she knew what to do with.  In my comment to her I might have begged mentioned that I would happily take a jar off her hands.  Lucky me;  she immediately emailed asking for my address and not too long after I received a package from her with TWO jars of homemade apple butter and a Cooking Light magazine loaded with banana bread recipes.   Now if you know me at all, you know I love me some bananas so, that was a welcomed surprise.  :)  I immediately called Maranda to thank her for the package and during the course of our conversation she mentioned wanting to make this bread.  I quickly flipped and found the recipe for myself and concurred that it did look and sound good. 

Jumping ahead a couple of weeks…during an exchange of texts Maranda said that she had made the bananas foster bread and that it was really good.  Not to be left banana breadless I quickly resolved to make the bread myself and we agreed to blog about it together this Friday (today!).  Sorry, I’m so late Maranda!

This isn’t your mama’s banana bread.  It has ground oatmeal,  allspice, and dark RUM in it. Definitely stuff not found in your everyday banana bread and to top it off it has a dark rum glaze that’s poured over it while still warm from the oven. 

I made several changes to the recipe but Maranda on the other hand stuck to it so hop over and see what she thought of her bananas foster bread.

Bananas Foster Bread,adapted from Cooking Light

Ingredients

• 1 1/2  cups  mashed ripe banana
• 1  cup  packed brown sugar, divided
• 6  tablespoons  butter, melted and divided
• 1/4  cup  cognac or dark rum, divided (I used Meyer’’s Dark Rum) 
• 1/3  cup  plain fat-free yogurt (I used sour cream)
• 2  large eggs
• 6.75  ounces  all-purpose flour (about 1 1/2 cups)
• 1/4  cup  ground flaxseed (I used old fashion oatmeal that I ground in my mini food processor)
• 3/4  teaspoon  baking soda
• 1/2  teaspoon salt
• 1/2  teaspoon  ground cinnamon
• 1/8  teaspoon  ground allspice
• Cooking spray
• 1/3  cup  powdered sugar
• splash of heavy cream, optional

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350°.

2. Combine banana, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 5 tablespoons butter, and 3 tablespoons cognac in a nonstick skillet. Cook over medium heat until mixture begins to bubble. Remove from heat; cool. Place banana mixture in a large bowl. Add yogurt, remaining 1/2 cup brown sugar, and eggs. Beat with a mixer at medium speed.

3. Weigh or lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour and next 5 ingredients (through allspice) in a small bowl. Add flour mixture to banana mixture; beat just until blended. Pour batter into a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan  (I baked mine in 3 mini loaf pans.) coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350° for 1 hour (my minis took 28 minutes) or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove from oven; cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack. Remove bread from pan; place on wire rack.

4. Combine remaining 1 tablespoon melted butter, remaining 1 tablespoon cognac, and powdered sugar; (I found my glaze too thick and added a splash of heavy cream to thin it out.) stir until well blended. Drizzle over the warm bread.

Truth…all the adults that tried the bread said it was very good but my three were not impressed.  More for me then!  :)

Click here for a printable recipe.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

Hey, guys! Check it out two posts in one week and it’s not even a holiday.  Ingrid’s getting crazy!  There have been a few comments left about me only posting on holidays and not posting much, so I’m hoping everyone’s happy now.  The commenters might also be the very same two people who are also posting about Cinnamon Swirl Bread  today.  :)

Cinnamon Swirl Bread was actually Monica’s challenge choice for May but we got a late start and pushed it back to June.  She chose Peter Reinhart’s recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Eaten straight out of hand, the kids and I were a bit unimpressed with the flavor but when we toasted and buttered a slice it went from “just okay” to delicious.  Add in some cinnamon and brown sugar to the butter and we’re talking serious cinnamon heaven!  (So good in fact, Jalen asked me to make more bread and we hadn’t finished the two loaves I just made!)  Besides using the bread to make some kicked up cinnamon toast I also made bread pudding.  Some very good bread pudding though if you ask Devon he’ll tell you it would have been better with bananas.  :)

With my lackluster photos and post I haven’t really done this bread justice so hop over to Michelle and Monica’s blogs to check out their bread (&  get the recipe).  FYI, Michelle might have mentioned something about cinnamon chips and you know Monica will have some amazing photos.  Get going…..

Banana Bread

I’m sure that most of you have a “go to” banana bread recipe but I hadn’t been  fortunate to find one until now.  As a matter of fact I’ve made many an unsuccessful recipe before this one.  Sadly all of my recipe attempts have been over browned and undercooked but not this one.  This one was perfection. 

For months now every time I mentioned banana bread Monica told me about this terrific recipe she had  (She got the recipe from Dawn at Vanilla Sugar.)  and even when Monica told me this recipe converted her from being a banana bread hater I just nodded yeah, yeah and never made a move.  I’m kicking myself now for waiting so long to give it a try.  Learn from my mistakes.  :)

I followed the recipe but baked four mini loaves instead of one large one.  Although I didn’t alter the recipe I did kick things up a notch with two of the mini loaves.  You ready?  I swirled in some left over caramel  from this caramel corn recipe and topped one of the caramel loaves with walnuts!  While the caramel ones were beyond good, the plain ones were also very good so don’t think you have to “supe” this up.  Three out of four loaves were gobbled up before the end of day and the fourth went to our football commissioner as “just because”.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread 

• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup mashed very ripe bananas
• 3 tbsp. sour cream
• 1 tbsp. lemon juice
• 2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips (optional) I left these out!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl with an electric mixer or a spoon, cream shortening and sugar together. Beat in eggs one at a time; then mashed bananas, sour cream, and lemon juice.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda. Slowly add dry ingredients to the wet mixture, then fold in chocolate chips. Pour into greased and floured 9x5x3 loaf pan. Bake for 60 minutes.

NOTE: If your bread is getting too dark, loosely cover bread with foil. I did this for the last 15 minutes of baking time.

I did have one tiny issue with my bread though it wasn’t due to the recipe.  It was with  my addition of caramel.   My caramel sunk to the bottom and some of it stuck to the pan. (Check out my bottom photo.  I scrapped out the caramel bits and hid them from the kids.  They were THAT good!) My first mistake was swirling it in which gave it a head start to the bottom.  The next time I’ll try layering in the caramel and see if that keeps it from diving straight to the bottom.  I’m not sure I could have kept the caramel from sticking but next time I’ll remove the bread after its cooled 10 minutes and allow it to finish cooling on a rack. My last change……more walnuts.  I added what I thought was plenty but once the bread started baking up I realized it really wasn’t. 

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Those of you who have read my blog a few times know that the Twins are super active and play various sports and you may also remember that Babygirl was cheerleading this year. WELLLLL, Devon’s Jr. Midget football team went 8-0 in the regular season!  They were the first team in the FOURTEEN years of our league’s history to go undefeated! As a matter of fact they won their conference in back to back years, another first!  One of the things I may not have mentioned was that Babygirl was cheering for her brother’s team.  WELLLLL, Babygirl’s squad won first place in the Mid-Florida cheerleading competition this weekend!  Not only were they competing against girls a couple of years older than them, half their squad has never cheered before, Babygirl included.  Both Winter Springs Jr. Midgets football team and cheerleaders were winners this season!  Unfortunately, the boys lost their first playoff game but they did have a good run.

Here are photos of my two in their uniforms!

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